The Book of Hard Things

by Sue Halpern (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $22)

Cuzzy Gage, eighteen years old and living in upstate New York, doesn’t have much in the way of prospects: no job, no home, and no family, except for a father in a mental hospital and an estranged girlfriend and their baby son. He’s been camping out in the woods, and winter is coming. When a schoolteacher from New York City takes Cuzzy in—partly to stem his own feelings of drift—an intense, unlikely friendship, full of wariness and misunderstandings, develops. This first novel by the essayist Sue Halpern recalls the author’s nature writing in its evocation of the sparse rock and pine of the Adirondack countryside, dotted with trailers and streams and baronial retreats. At times, the social tensions between characters feel too obviously choreographed: the action takes place in a town called Poverty. But Halpern does her characters—both the deprived locals and the overcivilized, rootless newcomers—the service of neither condescending to nor ennobling them.♦